White Lake Fights To Save Its Trees

The residents of White Lake, the Adirondack community just inside the Blue Line, have their dukes up. Again.

This time it's about a reconstruction of Route 28 through the Oneida County hamlet that will involve cutting down trees on the route. Before, it was a possible quarry operation that folks fought to knock down. It was.

"First it was in my backyard," Shirley Cornish explains, referring to the swatch of pink granite that rises directly behind her camp in White Lake. "Now, it's out front. This is ridiculous."

Shirley is a retired nurse from Utica. She's been living on White Lake since 1981, in an 80-year-old house built into a mossy hillside along Route 28. She winters in New Jersey.
Shirley's a fighter; she says her ancestors were patriots in the American Revolution.

She's signed up with an group known as Save White Lake Trees Organization, which was started by two Utica residents - Sheila Cuccaro and her husband Ron - who have been campers on White Lake close to 33 years. Sheila was putting up "save the trees" signs along Route 28 when I met her and Shirley at White Lake the other day.

Sheila says she and Ron, who run Adjustors International in Utica, learned of the road project in January. The basic plan involves the state Department of Transportation regional office in Utica and National Grid, the British-owned utility which describes itself as the second-largest in the nation, with 200,000 customers in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

The project Shirley is a retired nurse from Utica. She's been living on White Lake since 1981, in a 80-year-old house proposes to expand 10.3 miles of Route 28, from Alder Creek to McKeever, 7.4 miles of that in the Adirondack Park. DOT contends the project will enhance safety of the road, which Sheila calls a "speedway" that ought to stay as it is. As the highway is expanded about 54 feet, trees would be removed and power poles relocated, sometimes moving them from one side of the road to the other.

An early proposal for the project was submitted to the Adirondack Park Agency, official overseer of the wilderness, and was sent back to DOT and National Grid for more information. APA had a public meeting about the proposal in July in Forestport and has another scheduled in November in Ray Brook, the agency headquarters.

Sheila and Ron started putting up signs ("Say NO!! To National Grid and NYSDOT") Labor Day Weekend. They also laced trees on the route with yellow construction tape and added a new set of signs last week. She told me two residents refused the tape "because they said they'd made a deal with National Grid."

"Clear-cutting of trees along the roadway is completely contrary to environmental conservation," Sheila says. "It will blight the vista and cause additional highway runoff that will filter into this lake," which at some points is just a few yards from the road. There are some 160 homes on White Lake, which is said to be one of only two fed by springs in the Adirondacks.

Shirley said news of the project "hit me like a kick in the stomach. This park belongs to everyone. The only thing we have to protect us are our trees." She wonders about the fate of a "great maple tree" and columbine plants in her front yard.

Sheila says she hopes the park agency comes up with a solution "that ensures progress and maintains the environment at the same time." She's looking for APA to order a park-wide environmental impact study of power company expansion. Both she and Shirley fear the precedent cutting the trees would set for the park.

Specificially, she'd like to the agency to insist that National Grid "bury their power lines, thereby bringing their power transmission into the 21st century," the same way TV cable and phone line are underground. The utility maintains that's too expensive.

This is a statement on the project from the utility:

"National Grid takes its obligation to balance the needs for safe, reliable and cost-effective service with the value a community places on its trees and surrounding environment very seriously, particularly in the Adirondacks. The need to widen Route 28 is a priority of New York State DOT and we are obligated to accommodate that project. National Grid plans to assess any options we have that will best suit the balance we have to achieve."

Sheila Cuccaro believes the Save White Lake Trees campaign has been very successful, so far. She says APA was given about 300 signatures against the project, with about 250 more added since the website (www.savewhitelaketrees.org) went up. The committee's also received support from Protect The Adirondacks group and area legislators, including Assemblyman Mark Butler.

I ask Sheila if she'd tie herself to a tree, if it came to that. "It wouldn't bother me," she replies.

Dick Case writes Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at 470-2254, or by e-mail, dcase@syracuse.com.